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#Thomas Cooley Law School s Reputation Is In The Dumps. So It s Thinking About Changing Its Name

from the beats-actually-improving dept

We've written a few times about the Thomas M. Cooley law school -- a 4th tier, bottom of the barrel law school known for letting in a very high percentage of the people who apply. and also for coming up with its own ranking system (which includes "total volumes in the library" and "total law school square footage" among other factors) that says it's one of the best law schools in the world. If you value square footage, I guess. It's also known for suing a bunch of its own students for being critical of the school.

Anybody checked WMU's Medical School Ranking?

Mason Wheeler. Apr 12th, 2013 @ 4:50pm

It's all about the correlation and the causation

So, um, they could be better at. malpractice law? Forgive me, I'm just not seeing how that's a benefit. It sounds like WMU decided it needed a law school for the prestige part,

and that's the (perceived) benefit right there.

A few years back, here in Seattle there was a big kerfuffle going down about the owner of the Seattle SuperSonics, the local NBA team, selling the team to Oklahoma. One thing that a lot of people were annoyed about was that Seattle was about to go from being a city with three top-league sports teams (baseball, football, and basketball) to only having two.

If you look around the country at the cities with three such teams, and the cities with two such teams, the ones with three tend to be bigger and just generally "cooler" than the two-team cities, so the idea was that this was somehow diminishing Seattle in some way.

Of course, this is the correlation/causation arrow pointing in the wrong direction. The teams don't make the cities big and cool; bigger, cooler cities can afford more teams than smaller, less cool cities due to being bigger and cooler than them. And having our basketball team move out really hasn't changed Seattle all that much; it's still the same city it was when it left; just with less nasty traffic snarls on game nights.

If Western Michigan University is trying to acquire a law school alongside its med school "so that it can have both," you can bet that the same sort of thinking is in play here.